Thammasat University students interested in history, economics, political science, China, international relations, and related subjects may find it useful to participate in a free 26 April webinar on Tales from a Small North China Commercial Town.

The event, on Friday, 26 April 2024 at 8am Bangkok time, is organized by the Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences, The University of Hong Kong (HKU).

The TU Library collection includes some books about different aspects of Chinese commerce.

The event website explains:

Abstract

In the early 1930s Gaoyang (in Hebei province) was the center of one of China’s best known rural industrial districts, producing cotton and rayon textiles that were sold through a nation-wide marketing network. My own earlier work on Gaoyang, A Chinese Economic Revolution: Rural Entrepreneurship in the Twentieth Century, traced the prewar development of the industrial district and charted its fate during the socialist era and following the rebirth of private industry from the 1980s to 2000. The talk I am going to give returns to Gaoyang of the 1930s, making use of a rich set of “lost” materials to chart the impact of rural industrialization on local society. The materials are the original fieldwork notes of a two-year long sociological study of Gaoyang directed by the sociologist Chen Xujing of the Nankai Economic Research Institute and funded by the Rockefeller Foundation from 1935-37. My presentation will introduce the materials, briefly describe what they tell us about the “boom” town of Gaoyang in the early 1930s and discuss several “tales” as an indication of the kind of research that can be done with the new materials. One of the “tales” examines the local government’s use of lotteries to finance essential tasks when it had insufficient revenue, and the second takes up the question of smuggling and the clash between the patriotic sentiments of the business community and their economic interests.

About the Speaker

Dr. Linda Grove, Professor Emerita, Sophia University (Tokyo) has published books and articles on Chinese rural industrialization and social change, Chinese rural history, East Asian trade history, and Chinese women’s history.

Students are invited to register for the event at this link:

https://hku.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN__KSfU3Y2Q1iU5mtzNut1tA#/

With any questions or for further information, please write to

smblai@hku.hk

In a 1994 book review of China, 1898-1912: The Xinzheng Revolution and Japan by Douglas R.

Reynolds, Professor Grove wrote in part:

The present book, which is an expanded version of his prize winning essay on the ‘Golden Decade’ of Sino-Japanese relations, 1897-1907, offers a bold thesis that challenges many of our most common presumptions about late Imperial Chinese history and China’s relations with Japan. Reynolds argues that the significant revolution in early twentieth-century China was not the change of government in 1911, but rather the intellectual and institutional revolution of the preceding decade. In his view, the xinzheng (‘new system’ or ‘new government’) reforms of the late Qing dynasty were the result of close Chinese-Japanese collaboration, a collaboration that began only a few years after the end of the Sino-Japanese War. It was a combination of ‘Chinese interest in reform, Japanese wooing, and mutual alarm at renewed Western aggression’ that ‘combined to overcome deep animosities and to set the stage for an unprecedented era of cooperation between China and Japan’ (p. 23).

After examining the roots of Chinese fascination with Japan as reflected in the views of those associated with the reform faction in 1898, Reynolds turns to the study of the intellectual and institutional revolutions of the first decade of the century and the Japanese role in making them. He focuses on educational reforms, translation projects, military modernization, the establishment of a police system, and the problems of constitutional and legal reform.

In looking at the crucial role of educational reforms, Reynolds puts the well-known phenomenon of the flow of Qing students to Japan in a comparative perspective, noting that the total number of Chinese (some 25,000) who studied in Japan at this time represented the first example in world history of such a massive project for overseas education. He points out that Chinese modernizers saw Japan as the shortcut to acquiring knowledge of the modern (Western) world, both in school classrooms and through the translation of Western works that had already been translated into Japanese.

Prominent Japanese universities set up special short-term courses for Chinese students in administration and law that, it was believed, would provide important modern training after the abolition of the examination system. At the same time as many students were flocking to Japan for education, Japanese teachers and advisers were hired for schools in China. They worked throughout China, and modern primary education was modeled on Japanese primary schools. Most of the textbooks used in the late Qing were translations of Japanese school books.

As regards the reasons for this collaboration between the two countries, Reynolds cites several factors that encouraged close relations in spite of the recent war. First, the Japanese were willing to lend assistance, and their experts were also willing to learn Chinese and accept the living and working conditions offered. Second, most of the foreigners living and teaching in China at that time were missionaries, and the Chinese authorities were concerned that hiring Western teachers ran the risk of helping to spread Christianity. Japan had long experience with and sensitivity to much the same issues.

Following his study of education reform, the author looks at the role of Japanese institutions and advisers in the forming of the modern Chinese military, police, and in the drafts for legal and constitutional reform. In each section he introduces new materials and little-known examples of Sino-Japanese collaboration. Curiously he does not mention the programs for technology transfer and technical and vocational education that were a central part of the Zhili provincial reforms under Yuan Shikai, although he discusses these reforms at some length.

Historians of both China and Japan will find that China, 1898-1912 challenges many of the common assumptions that we use in analyzing Sino-Japanese relations in the modern period. By stressing the xinzheng reforms and the Japanese role in making them, Reynolds is arguing for Japanese institutional patterns’ positive and lasting influence on China. He also strongly suggests that Chinese sponsors of the reforms were playing a progressive role in trying to rapidly modernize many institutions, following the basic model of Meiji Japan. This view contradicts the common interpretations of the major actors on the Chinese side, who are more usually seen as carrying out a desperate and ultimately unsuccessful program to prevent the fall of the last imperial dynasty. While historians of China will undoubtedly welcome this solidly grounded study of the late Qing reforms and all of the data it provides on a decade of Sino-Japanese cooperation, few are likely to go quite as far as the author in asserting that the xinzheng reforms were more important than the 1911 revolution in shaping later Chinese intellectual and institutional forms. […]

(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)